I Told You So - 22 July 2025

Well... this didn't take long. As I, and most econ types, told you would happen, Red Blooded American companies piggy-backed (emphasis on Piggy) on the tariffs to jack up their prices. I guess that's the American Way, "Get your money for nothin' (I want my, I want my)" [Dire Straits]?

And, this time, it's steel, so it will percolate through the rest of the economy.

American steel makers are raising prices, forcing new costs onto domestic manufacturers that make everything from cars to military tanks. The increases come on the back of President Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum.

"You always see that as one of the traps of a tariff," said John O'Leary, the chief executive of Daimler Truck North America, which buys large amounts of steel to make Freightliner and Western Star trucks and Thomas Built school buses. American steel makers, he said, now have "more headroom to be able to raise the price."

Good ole patriotic American Bidnezz: ready to screw the rest of us to steal a buck.

The Greatest Threat - part the fourteenth

The Office of Data Integrity, in partnership this time with the Office of Policy Integrity (to tell the truth, it's almost always such), is shutting down the most significant source of long term climate data. This should come as little surprise, since Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) complained about Covidiot Infection^™ back in 2020.

If you don't test, you don't have any cases. If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.

And, of course, his sub-GED crowd of MAGAnauts nodded their empty heads in agreement.

The readings collected from Mauna Loa, starting in 1958, were used to create what is famously known as the Keeling curve. It's an upward-swooping line that charts the steady rise of carbon dioxide over the past seven decades — the result of nations burning oil, gas and coal.

But President Trump's proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We wouldn't want to keep an on-going record of the success of "clean, beautiful coal", now would we? Of course not.

As usual, The MAGAnauts care nothing about what sort of Mother Earth they leave their little ones, much less their little ones little ones. If these Bozos keep control long enough, today's MAGAnauts will, themselves, have to live on a Mother Earth that's scorching hot and oscillating between drought and flood. Bozos ascribe Hell to being As Hot As, and claim to have read Dante. Alas, the bottom of Dante's Hell is solid ICE.

Thought For the Day - 17 July 2025

My my. Now this is just too, too rich. The WSJ publishes The Letter to Jeff from (among others) Garfield 2.0 (a step closer), and, as one might expect, he goes batshit. Suing the WSJ, NewsCorp, and Murdoch (personally?). I just said to the Wife, this is the start of some Chinese Water Torture, as payback for all those tariffs. [timestamp this as 9:50 pm EDT, just because more water likely has dripped by the time you've read.]

So, a bit of Warren Zevon is called for

I'm hiding in honduras, I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Send lawyers, guns, and money
Send lawyers, guns, and money

Send lawyers, guns, and money, hiyah!
Send lawyers, guns, and money, ow!

I'm gonna bet Rupert has more money, and smart lawyers, than Garfield 2.0 (a step closer). Being outed as a pedophile might not get Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) impeached (the MAGAnauts are all preverts, ya know), but it'll take some git out of his giddyup.

The Greatest Threat - part the thirteenth

Today's data release may well be the last "bad news" on Inflation you'll ever see. It's so unfair!! And FALSE!!! And it's all Jerry's fault!!! Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) hereby declares that no data shall be released to the public without approval of the Office of Data Integrity. We can't have FALSE data floating around that Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) get irritated by.

Inflation accelerated in June as President Trump's tariffs started to leave a bigger imprint on the economy, keeping the Federal Reserve on track to hold interest rates steady when policymakers next meet this month.

The Consumer Price Index rose 2.7 percent from a year ago, the swiftest pace since February, data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed on Tuesday. That is slightly higher than expected and is up from an annual pace of 2.4 percent in May.

I am among those who remain convinced that Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) will be done in by a MAGAnaut (a Butler clone), not a Lunatic Lefty, just as Garfield died at the hand of an office seeker. That's the price of spoils system governance. It will happen again.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the fifth

Dedicated reader will recall the inference about Mad Dictator Don's demolishing of much of federal governance: there will be no social goods or services in his USofA. Not even weather

Some in the weather industry — and free-market Republicans — see NOAA's forecasting work as a prime candidate for outsourcing and have called for the agency to be "dismantled." NOAA is also a target of the fossil fuel industry because its scientists contribute important climate change research. The White House has proposed $2 billion in cuts to the agency, or 28 percent of its budget.

You're a sod buster, and you want to know how the summer's gonna go?? That'll be $1,000 a month. Ya wanna know if your kiddies will be swept away in a flood? Every penny you've got. God damn it.
Enter, stage right, AI:

Even as these A.I. forecasts begin to outperform traditional methods, their developers don't fully understand how they work. The software could be learning physics, simply matching patterns or using some effective combination of the two.

"When you do a physics-based model, you're being smart," Mr. Creus-Costa said. "When you do a deep learning model, you don't have to be smart. We're not writing down the physics. We're just having it learn."

Well... they're lying. They do know how they work. What they don't know is whether how they work makes for true results. The myriad of hallucinations is enough proof of that. Correlcation is not causation. You heard that one Day 1 of Baby Stats 101. It's still true.

Has it ever occurred to anyone else that, if it's really true that all of these AI vendors have each scraped every last scrap of bytes from the innterTubes, why do we need multiple, redundant copies? Each scarfing up enough wee little electrons to run thousands of normal, middle class homes. Is there a point to that? I mean, beyond making PC vendors (mostly in China, of course) richer? Isn't that stock of innterTubes shit some kind of Social Good?

Are these compute kiddies ever going to figure out that AI has no intelligence? It's just correlation among old data. Nothing Intelligent there. As always: can AI intuit special relativity from the fact of a tram moving away from an early 20^th century tram? No fucking way. Or, as one of the 'innovators' in private weather put it

"I have my personal philosophies that are not aligned with, like, what's best for our private weather company," Mr. Dean told me. "You don't want to live in this capitalist nightmare of like, 'Pay 10 bucks for today's weather.' That's too far."

And you have to know that Dean is off by at least an order of magnitude.

Thought For The Day - 11 July 2025

Well... chickens are coming home to roost. After all that propaganda from Pizza Gate to Epstein's Client List, the MAGAnauts are exploding. So, can we suss out the state of the world? Sure we can.

First: is there such a list or not? Likely, yes. If so, then
- is it largely the Lunatic Left or the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts? If the former, there's absolutely no fucking reason to not release the list. Yes? I mean this is the world of Mad Dictator Don, now isn't it?

- If so, and it's not the Lunatic Left, then it must be that Mad Dictator Don and/or The MAGAnauts are the bulk of the preverts. What else makes sense? In this case, Mad Dictator Don will never let Pammie release the List. He may be able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but being a full-blooded prevert is political suicide.

Second: there is no such list. What then? Well the The MAGAnauts and Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts were promised, more or less, by the The MAGAnauts' Fearless Leaders that such a list was absolutely, positively Real. So, they're pissed that what they were betting on (in the real money on the table way), are loooooooooooosers. Poor babies.

Reporting/rumor as I type is that Bongino is jumping ship. Why would he do that? It would make sense that he is convinced that the Client List is Real and is mostly, if not exclusively, of the Lunatic Left and he and the rest of the Base (hehe) MAGAnauts are being betrayed. As deputy director, would he be privy to the List? Most likely, unless Pammie really, really doesn't like the way he walks. She's not a paragon of virtue, now is she? But, again with fervor, if the List is mostly the Lunatic Left (and not including Mad Dictator Don of course), then we'd have the List. With bells on. Only if Mad Dictator Don is on the List along with lots of the Lunatic Left, would Pammie withhold it. And, as I type, it's sitting in the Deep Deep State.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sherlock Holmes

The World is Not Linear - part the second

Yes, a series. And none too soon. The world is your oyster. Not mine, alas. Like eating someone else's phlegm. Not to my taste. But many people say they do love them shellfish.

Turns out, they are largely farmed, and said farms are tripping. But not on LSD. Dear Reader may recall the big to-do with acid rain decades ago. Don't hear too much about it these days. Turns out, acidification happens everywhere, including the oceans. And, it turns out, much of the critter population in the oceans prefers certain levels of acid in their habitat.

Oysters aren't happy with how things are going.

"We are seeing a very significant change in the rate of acidification," said Dr. Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who has been studying the problem since it first surfaced, and an author on the recent paper. "The rate of change has shown much faster change over the last 50 years than it did over the previous 200 years. The expectation is, as we continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that rate will continue to increase."

Mother Nature hates straight lines.

And, naturally, there are externalities in the mix. The oceans are an enormous food chain. Not an ocean biologist, but since Mother Earth is about 70% oceans, I'll guess that it's the largest on Mother Earth. So, acidification, or any environmental disruption, is likely to disrupt the food chain. Yup.

Treating water in the oyster hatcheries is merely a stopgap measure. Aside from shellfish, acidification is taking its toll on other sea life, including tiny pteropods (sea slugs and snails) and krill. That is causing a decline in food sources and critical nutrients for salmon and other fish.

Not with a bang but a whimper - T.S. Eliot

By The Numbers - part the ninetieth

The World is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone (Ph.D. math stats)/1974

The MAGAnauts, importantly The Musk Ox, are fixated on the shibboleth that the planet is in danger of population collapse. They're so full of shit, I can smell it here. Today, I'll feature Ross Douthat, whose column today dredges it up, again. Mother Earth sports about 8.2 billion folks, most barely have food and water to survive. Fewer now than before Mad Dictator Don ascended his Throne, and the destruction of USAID. I guess starving folks in those shithole countries are really a drag on the global economy? Let 'em die. Joni Ernst said so.

Here's Douthat:

Leaving abortion regulation to the states makes sense as a provisional political settlement, but leaving pro-family policy to the states (when pro-life states are poorer than average and harder-pressed to offer support) is a dereliction.

So, I guess, sub-GED breeders in Red States are a Good Thing while starving Black Folk in shithole countries is just Darwin working his magic? We need more MAGA knuckledraggers if the Trump Dynasty (Eric volunteered to be the next one) is to prosper; they'll vote for any Trump.

With the push for yet more AI/automation wiping out all kinds of jobs, do we really need more idle hands to make things? Of course not. What we'll need, and real soon now, is a new method of income distribution. As mentioned here more than once: the more capital in the BoM, the less slack there can be in output. Y'all still gotta pay for the machines and maintenance no matter how much you produce. And, if producers across Mother Earth resort to ever higher levels of capitalized production, the greater will be the need to: A) produce 24/7/365 to spread all that capital cost to the maximum degree and thus minimize average cost and B) have enough moolah in the hands of consumers to buy all those wonder widgets. Hard to pull that off as more and more hands are made redundant. If Supply Side econ were a true thing, there would be no problem. Producers would continue to boost production, and supply would create the necessary demand. Yeah, you're right. That notion is horseshit. Didn't work when Laffer (couldn't have a better name for him) pushed it into being way back when.

Mother Earth has a finite stock of resources, and the notion all 8.2 billion can, if they truly believe in (and tithe to) Prosperity Jesus Evangelism, attain the lifestyle of the USofA 1% (which is about 3.7 million); is, well, lunacy. The arithmetic doesn't work. And The MAGAnauts know it. They just keep their lips shut. They want them their tax reductions.

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (yes, she said it)

Blame Samuelson

By now we all know that Mad Dictator Don is as dumb as a sack of hair, but how does this idiocy manifest? Let me count the ways.

The entirety of the Big Ugly Bill is founded on a single principle: there are no social goods and services, and any found hiding (like, say, drug development) must be killed no matter what. Where did this notion come from? In one sense, that has always been the mantra of the proto-MAGAnauts since, at least, the New Deal. They hated it, and tried their damndest to kill and then repeal it.

By the time 1950 rolled around, the econ space had been hit by an asteroid, named Paul Samuelson. He, arguably, invented mathematical econ. This brand is grounded in the micro-model; data based and "ethically neutral". His Ph.D. dissertation was expanded into "Foundations of Economic Analysis".

While widely seen as an explanation of the macro-model, it is based on the micro-model of individualism. Like it or not, the macro-model is just a policy exercise. The Damn Gummint, as Keynes understood, should, at times, bolster the economy when the various private actors fail. That happens a lot, when the micro-model ethic is dog-eat-dog.

Keynes would not approve of the scam Mad Dictator Don is running. The macro economy is doing just fine. And, naturally, when the economy is doing just fine, there's no reason for the Damn Gummint to engage in deficit spending. Not a bit of it. And, of course, giving away the Treasury to the 1% won't help.

To top it off, today we find that Mad Dictator Don is actively Making America Worse Again by killing off yet more future tech.

     For Immediate Release - The White House

     President Trump has this day announced a new and innovative offensive in 
     the effort to MAGA.  We don't need no Chinese EV shit.  "They don't know
     what the fuck they're doing."

     What do we have?  We have clean, beautiful COAL.  And to make the best use
     of COAL, The President has directed DARPA to spearhead the rapid, as in 
     Operation Warp Speed, development of the All American Steam Truck.  It 
     will be powered by an economical COAL fired plant, have top speed of 
     130 mph, and get 1,000 miles per ton of COAL.  All American EV charging 
     stations must provide the COAL alternative within 90 days of first sale 
     of the All American Steam Truck, or face criminal prosecution from my 
     Hot Looking Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Thought For The Day - 2 July 2025

Just in case it isn't obvious: rule by a Unitary Executive (the wet dream of the MAGAnauts come true) is just a fancy way of saying Dictatorship. Mad Dictator Don has already shown that there's nothing stopping him from reaching as deep as needed into the bureaucracy to make his wishes happen. Paramount is the latest entity to cave to extortion. An explicit threat isn't even needed. The Rule of Law is dead.